About Edward Burtynsky

Edward Burtynsky’s large-format color photographs document the ramifications of human industry on the natural world in a perversely beautiful manner. Bold swathes of color and rich texture render his images of mines, industrial refineries, shipbreaking yards, and other scarred landscapes from Detroit to Bangladesh, painterly. “Dryland Farming” (2011), an aerial series exploring how humans reshape natural topography through farming in a semi-arid, remote region of northern Spain, evokes abstract painting; seeing the colors and shapes from 2,000 feet above reminded the artist of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937). Burtynsky intends his work to spark “a second look at what we call progress,” which has won him acclaim as an environmental champion as well as an artist; he received a TED Prize in 2005 for producing images that “powerfully alter the way we think about the world and our place in it.”